The Bend 500 – Warm Up & Race 26 Results
Zach Bates/Craig Lowndes – Car #888
Warm Up – 21st (1:51.8233)
Race 26 – 16th
“Today for me I think was really good. I had great pace throughout my stints. Obviously as the race went on there was some build up of rubber which made it a bit tricky at times but we just had to chip away. Hadn’t done any stints that long before today so there’s an unknown there in what it’s going to be like. The team did a fantastic job, gave me a great car that we could power through the field with. You always think what if we could’ve qualified better, and that’s a big thing to take away and work on from this weekend. A safety car would’ve helped there but at the end of the day we have to race the race that’s happening on track.”
“The race itself I think I did fifty something laps, wasn’t counting, I reckon if I’d counted it would’ve felt like a lot more. It was tough to be honest, it’s quite a physical track, those rights are really loaded and go for so long which makes it hard to get through, hard on the body. I’m feeling it now and I’ll be feeling it later.”
“Starting in twenty sixth it was only going to be up from there, and Craig got a really good start. We did have a run off and did get up against another car which dropped us back a bit before the pit stop.”
“After he’d done his stints and handed it over to me it was all about just chipping away. Even though there were a few little errors from me but together we’d moved up ten spots which we take positives from.”
“Fantastic to get the first Enduro under the belt with the team, with Craig, and myself for experience. It’s really, really good preparation for Bathurst and that’s how we’ve got to look at it, it’s going to be huge that, I can’t even comprehend what it’s going to be like. I’ve just got to go away, look at what the guys up the road at Red Bull Ampol are doing and see how I can learn from them and Craig as well to be as primed as I can be for Bathurst.”
“Going into the race today we knew the first stint was always going to be chaotic, starting a little bit further back than we wanted to, but we just made sure that we didn’t damage the car or have any incidents in those opening few. Saying that we did have a couple of little ones, little incidents, towards the end of the stint I just made a little mistake running wide off the triple right which was a little bit frustrating because we had a really fast car. So it was just for me that little mistake but up until then the car was great and we were just getting into a rhythm based on the race around us.”
“In the end I was actually really happy after my forty something laps, I think that we managed to scramble back especially in my second stint. Again, we had a very fast car. Our pit stop was really quick, really good, and I think that for me was a big part of then being able to give the car in one piece across to Zach and then let him run home.”
“The good thing is that this is obviously a prelim to Bathurst and we took two good things away from it… a fast car and some strong work by the team in the pits. I think we’ve got a better procedure now, Zach and I we work extremely well together, the economics of the car are good, so we can tick a few boxes there from the weekend. I think that we learned a lot here… the sense of logistics, the way we operate, and I think that even though we qualified poorly we ended up having a great race car. So at the end of the day when we go to Bathurst, we can hang our heads high really take a lot of positives out of this weekend.”
“Zach’s done a great job. This is a first for him and to now have an Enduro under his belt, to do the multiple laps in the double stint that he’s done here at quite a physical track, I think that gives him a good insight to what Bathurst is going to bring.”